“IEEE Std 802.11, 1999 Edition (ISO/IEC 8802-11: 1999)”, defines a set of standards for wireless local area network (WLAN) communication. A station (STA) may be any device that includes wireless functionality according to the 802.11 standards, e.g., a laptop personal computer (PC), a handheld device such as a personal digital assistant (PDA) or mobile phone, or a peripheral device such as a printer or scanner, and may be mobile, portable, or stationary. A station that maintains an independent timing synchronization function (TSF) and allows other stations to connect to it, forming a network, may be referred to as an access point (AP). An elementary network architecture including an AP and at least one STA may be referred to as a basic service set (BSS).
An AP may be a dedicated device with additional functionality such as, for example, providing a bridge to wired network infrastructure, or arbitrating communication of stations in the WLAN, or it may provide only temporary AP functionality through a combination of hardware and software. A group of stations operating in peer-to-peer communication with each other form an independent basic service set (IBSS), or ad-hoc network. When a station operates as an IBSS STA, it may not be able to connect to an infrastructure access point.
Other standards, for example, “IEEE Std 802.15.1-2002”, define a set of standards for wireless personal area network (WPAN) communication. A personal area network (PAN) connection differs from a local area network (LAN) connection in several aspects, including, for example, that a PAN may usually operate via point-to-point connections, may not require authentication to infrastructure equipment, and may not necessarily provide the routing capabilities usually offered by a LAN.
A conventional use case network may include concurrent local and personal area wireless networks. For example, a laptop or notebook computer may connect to, e.g., a wireless bridge or a remote printer, over a WLAN and to a peripheral device, e.g., a projector or a storage device, over a WPAN.
One method for implementing a concurrent wireless local and personal area network is to equip a device with two independent wireless adapters, which may be of the same wireless protocol or of two different wireless protocols, for example, WLAN over 802.11 BSS mode and WPAN over 802.15. This may involve doubling of physical resources such as, for example, baseband processors and/or radio frequency circuitry.
Another option is to utilize the same adapter for both WLAN and WPAN by allowing the user to manually switch between the two modes. For example, an 802.11 network interface card (NIC) may be used as a WLAN device in BSS mode and may be manually switched to operate as a PAN device in IBSS mode. However, a manually switched adapter may only connect to one network, for example, either a PAN or a LAN, at any given time.
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